Two elements that actual RPGs have been pioneering this gen, though, have been morality and branching. They go hand-in-hand to a certain extent, but for me they’ve become an integral part of the role-playing experience, mainly because they actually entail playing a role. Previously even silent protagonists have been stretching the definition of roles, being that you’re along for the ride and doing nothing to put your mark on the character.

I’ve been playing The Witcher 2 over the last couple of weeks, now that I can play the incredible Xbox 360 port – seriously, there must have been some actual witchcraft involved there – and it puts to shame most games in their attempts to get these new mechanics right. It shouldn’t be so, because this is the RPG where you’re actually playing a defined character with an established personality and back story, but by casting you as a protagonist who is by default a neutral outsider in all conflicts, CD Projekt Red has its cake and eats it, as Geralt, and therefore the player, can do what he likes without breaking character.

Morality in games has only recently become fashionable, and it’s often depressingly childish in how binary it is. Mass Effect is another offender, where your character genuinely starts to look scarred and glow with an eerie red light if you decide not to take the recklessly moral ‘Paragon’ route. The morality in that game is literally reduced to a number, your responses adding a +1 to your Paragon/Renegade bar depending on whether you prefer the recklessly idealistic absolute moral code of ‘good’ Shepard or the cackling villain of the ‘bad’ route, wherein you have to wonder about a galactic society that lets such an unhinged individual be in charge of the fate of everything. The series actually rewards you for picking one extreme over another, suggesting that Shepard is deliberately set up to be either Mary Sue or space Hitler.

But back to The Witcher 2. Almost every exchange in it has different outcomes, and the majority don’t actually do much to affect the overall story. Whether you let the war criminals get away with it, turn them in or hand them over to the vengeful spirit doesn’t get you any closer to catching the regicidal maniac, but all the outcomes are justifiable in a witcher’s morality. More importantly, it makes the way the game will hide major branching points behind seemingly innocuous decisions all the sneakier and more impressive – one quick decision in the first act will decide the fate of a town, and the join is so seamless that you might not even realise that there was an alternative when you pass it.

Such an approach makes sense too. Really, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter if you threaten or punch someone for being a bit of an arse, or if you try to squeeze a few more orens out of your client if you feel a bit vindictive. It doesn’t make you a particularly nice person, but the world of The Witcher is a cut-throat one, and being a bastard doesn’t make your eyes glow and add a few points to your ethereal moral barometer in real life and so shouldn’t in virtual ones. All it does is add depth to your Geralt without stopping him from being the Geralt, providing a valuable demonstration of both how RPGs with blank slate protagonists and actual main characters can handle choice. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s extremely impressive to me.

It’s early days on this aspect of gaming, and it’s no secret that in-game writing could be better, if I’m being charitable. It’s getting better with each generation, though, and some day maybe everything will be up to these standards.

As it seemingly has with so many other media, it was the iPad that’s shaken up board gaming. It doesn’t take long for iOS gamers to get beyond the fool’s hope that [insert favourite PC/console game here] will transfer to touchscreen controls and inevitably get into the gateway drugs like Words With Friends, and from there it’s not a massive leap to the harder stuff. For me it was Neuroshima Hex followed by Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer but Ticket To Ride, Catan and Carcassonne all seem to be notably vicious when it comes to digging those claws in. Those are particularly good conversions that show board games and the iPad to be such perfect bedfellows that I’m desperate for some of the more highly regarded big names to make the transition.

Really, it solves all of the problems, mainly logistical, of modern board games. No like-minded friends? Online play solves that. No time to dedicate a few hours to a game? Asynchronous multiplayer with push notifications renders it a non-issue. No shuffling cards. No missing pieces. No setting up and clearing away afterwards. No possibility for mistakes in tracking stats and damage in complicated battles. Purists may decry the lack of physicality, but I’m perfectly happy with a big touchscreen and several games in something the size of a magazine.

I find myself jealously eyeing up games like the well-regarded Battlestar Galactica tie-in or something different like Arkham Horror, hoping for someone to make the effort to adapt them so that I can get the co-operative experience without having to pay £40 for the box and, you know, find real people to play with. I’ll probably end up murdered in a ditch somewhere if I start inviting randoms round to play.

I’m sure physical gaming has as many purists decrying the proliferation of sub-£5 touchscreen downloadables as video gaming does, but they’re just as wrong. It’s another example of how the digital world is broadening the horizons of once-inaccessible corners of gaming, and it’s a very good thing.

I can watch any almost any movie from any decade on some form of disc or streaming service nowadays, even if they were produced decades before digital video, the Internet and even televisions existed, and it’s essentially the same experience as anyone who saw it on day one. I can walk into any of a range of high street shops and find popular films from the 30s and 40s, brand new and easily accessible.

Contrast that with games. Try finding a particular game from outside the top 40 new, or anything but the most popular games from last generation. Try finding anything from the generation before that. There are, of course, services like Good Old Games, which are certainly good things, but what happens to games from long-dead developers or ones that aren’t deemed commercially viable? What route is there to play, say, Spectrum games? PC Engine? Almost any system has at least a couple of gems, but it’s impossible to play them without getting lucky on the used market or resorting to piracy, both of which we keep hearing are as bad as each other from the publishers’ perspective.

Some classic publishers like Nintendo and SNK are still going concerns in one form or another and so can offer their older games, and that’s fantastic. I’ll happily support those offerings, especially those that allow me to pick and choose reasonably priced and well-emulated individual games. But for plenty of older material, that’s not an option – it’s not like you can download some C64 games onto Commodore’s latest machine.

It’s when you start looking into community-led preservation efforts that you realise how much better they are than their official equivalents. Perhaps the best example is World of Spectrum, which not only functions as a massive database of information on Speccy games but also offers the majority of them to download or to play in a Java-based emulator directly on the site. Scans of covers, cross-referenced articles from the magazines of the time, meticulous attempts to preserve every version of every game, and all with the admirable ambition of being a comprehensive, free museum for an important period in gaming history. It’s not done for profit, and when actual games are offered to download, it’s done with the permission of the original developers and publishers.

Even for classic hardware without the following to sustain a site of such size – or, perhaps less defensibly, those from a couple of generations ago that are still the subject of poorly emulated and overpriced compilations – chances are a glance at certain more seedy websites will unearth a torrent with every game and an emulator, tied up in one handy download. Illegal or not, until this industry takes a step back and realises how inaccessible its past really is, I’m crediting the pirates there with providing a valuable service.

New games are increasingly encumbered with DRM, sometimes to the extent that the game will become unplayable if the studio and its authentication servers ever go offline. That’s all well and good now, but the experience of the last few years and the fact that it only takes a glance at the big developers of the SNES generation to see how few of today’s will still be around in another decade suggests that the only hope for the future playability of those games is either to hope that studios in their death throes have the wherewithal to produce a patch to nuke the DRM or to let pirates do it. Only one of those options is anywhere close to being a sure thing.

It’s important to note that I’m not going to support those who are pirating current games because they want them without paying, even if it’s those people’s work that ultimately allows the mass archival that I’m championing. The best examples of these projects are done on long dead platforms that aren’t going to cost anybody any money, and taking revenue from the industry – and, arguments over exactly how much aside, it does cost publishers money – will only affect what is left to preserve in the future.

I’m not going to deny that almost no high-street presence is a bad thing for the visibility of gaming, putting it entirely into the hands of online retailers and forcing platform holders’ hands in getting their digital distribution systems together. High-street electronics stores haven’t exactly been thriving either, and the low margins on hardware have always made them lukewarm on gaming at the best of times – again, none of them in my town – so it’s not unfeasible that some towns will have nowhere to buy games of any kind in the near future, unless you count an iPhone from the O2 shop.

But even despite these onrushing problems, I won’t mourn Game when it goes.

It’s been everything that’s wrong with games retail for a long time. Coupled with the supermarkets and online retailers, it mostly killed off the once-thriving independent retail market, which, for me, took away a big part of the gaming community and places where I made friends I still have today. No indies meant no import games in shops, but moving entirely online hasn’t destroyed that market and it won’t for the games market in general.

Having Game be this industry’s sole representative at retail has been embarrassing, frankly. Looking around one of the shops, it’s both a typical example of a retailing dinosaur, struggling to sell new product as it claws desperately to the RRP that no one expects to pay any more, and devalues games by looking and acting like it’s only patronised by people who like shopping in a glorified pawn shop. I don’t feel good when I bite the bullet and go in because I need a product immediately but find myself stuck in the queue behind a kid haggling over how little he’s being offered for FIFA 08, or when I buy something new and get nudged towards saving a whole £5 by buying the used one with stickers all over it and not a penny for the developers I’m supporting. No wonder people who only go in for birthday and Christmas presents think gaming is for people with a mental age of 12.

I appreciate that I just went after the notion of the RRP and that digital distribution has a lot to learn there, but without the likes of Game complaining, platform holders – and, you’d hope, the developers themselves – are free to actually compete on price. I fear Sony and Microsoft’s enforced pricing structures here, but I’m sure they’ll fall into line eventually. Microsoft has already shown itself willing to compromise on restrictive policies, with more rumoured to come, under pressure from gamers and developers, and all the collapse of retail means is that a lot of this learning is going to be done on the fly, perhaps sooner than we anticipated, more out of necessity than design.

So farewell, Game. You won a couple of battles, but you’re going to lose the war.

But without any new multiplayer – or even, more gallingly, old multiplayer – Halo: Anniversary is a good opportunity to go back to the first game and see whether it’s actually as great as the hype would have us believe. My theory was that the years and a million arguments between fanboys have led to both what Halo did right and what it did wrong being amplified, so while a two-weapon limit and recharging health weren’t the foundation of a new dawn for the 21st Century’s most popular genre, The Library isn’t that bad. Ten years on from my first playthrough, I actually found the Flood quite enjoyable to fight, and what I like and dislike about certain levels has changed dramatically. I love the horror vibe of the enemy-free section in 343 Guilty Spark, for example, but the open battlefields of Assault on the Control Room that I enjoyed in 2002 were overshadowed by the tedious repetition of rooms. Needless to say, doing practically the same level in reverse, only with Flood and without a tank, in Two Betrayals seemed like the low point.

First of all, how is the remastering job? While it’s not immediately all that impressive, it’s striking how much has changed when flipping to the original graphics. Looking at that makes me thankful that the graphical overhaul is closer to complete remake territory, and putting it closer to the graphical standards of current games illustrates just how dull a lot of modern shooters are to look at; nowhere will you see such a refreshingly vibrant palette of greens, purples, blues and pinks, and it’s even made the classic graphics look drab in comparison.

Too bad that something – possibly the strain of pushing two engines, possibly the 3D, or maybe even a misguided attempt to keep things true to the original Xbox – makes the frame rate inconsistent. This should be running locked at 30fps at the very least, and it undermines the otherwise-lovely presentation.

Flaws aside, however, I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting Halo, and after years of seeing it barracked by popular backlash from areas of the community I was surprised by how much I liked it. Bungie did a tremendous job of balancing satisfying weapons, very believable AI and a few truly brilliant level designs that 343 Industries’ was right not to touch in its attempts to modernise it. Is it a remake? Is it an HD remaster? It’s somewhere in between and I like it. More please.

It’s been at the back of my mind, though. Working on Retro Gamer, I frequently read interviews with people who made masterpieces in their bedrooms before they’d even finished school, which I suppose has made an impact, and then I’ve run into something of a perfect storm: Code Year, talk of the recent overhaul of school computing – which, as someone with an A-level in the useless old-style ICT, makes me insanely jealous – and the push behind the homebrew-friendly Raspberry Pi, all mixed in with a bit of a self-improvement bent on which I’ve found myself.

So Code Year’s been teaching me the fundamentals through building basic applications and games in JavaScript, and on the recommendation of some forum buddies I’ve started learning Python as well. I can’t do much beyond play with variables, but within a couple of weeks I know enough to make my computer draw a grid, simulate a dice roll, or move a sprite wherever I tell it. Baby steps, but I can see how these fundamentals build up into something that could legitimately be called a game.

I’m not going to go so far as to drop everything and embark on a career in development – not the most stable area right now – or get ahead of myself by announcing that I’m creating the next Minecraft, but man, it’s a good feeling when you can feel it clicking. It’s a string to my bow and something I want as a hobby so that I’m not strictly a consumer when it comes to computing.

I will make Shenmue III once I’ve worked out how to get lookingForSailors() running on a Dreamcast, though.

A good multiplayer game has the ability to hook me like nothing else, and Battlefield 3 really, really is. In terms of days it’s already my most-played 360 game in terms of days, and even though I’m not nearly done with it, I’ve still clocked more than 86 hours at the time of writing. That’s almost unheard of for me, and the only thing I can think of that come close is the 120 hours spent one wonderful summer on Return to Castle Wolfenstein’s multiplayer. Another class-based multiplayer FPS? Funny, that.

Fair enough if you think the campaign is mediocre at best, because it is. A couple of highlights aside, it’s not even as good as Bad Company 2′s offering; the most uninteresting kind of generic hoo-ah Black Hawk Down nonsense. But I still don’t care; it’s a Battlefield game, and as such it’s kind of a new thing to even have a single-player campaign. Don’t bother if that’s what you want most in a game because you will be disappointed, and you’ll be going into this game for the wrong reasons.

I’m now conscious that I’ve put more criticism into the game at the top of the list than any other here, so allow me to gush a bit.

There are more polished multiplayer games, there are more popular ones, but none is better at the epic feeling of taking part in a real battle than this. Playing the attacking team on Tehran Highway, cresting that first hill in a convoy of tanks, APCs, jeeps and infantry as the defenders try to repel you, missiles launching in the background. Fighting your way up the hill in Seine Crossing towards the M-COM stations, taking it in turns to draw defending fire as your team pushes forward before putting a rocket into the building where the enemy snipers are holed up. Sneaking up behind the tank that’s giving your team some grief to stick some C4 to it. Perfectly judging the drop of a bullet through your ballistic scope to put a bullet into someone’s head from half a kilometre away. The fact that this kind of thing happens on a nightly basis keeps me coming back and will likely continue to.

The beauty of these kinds of lists is that they’re personal, and the position of Battlefield 3 reflects how, no matter how much I value great writing, classic characters and innovative game design, the fundamental reason to play games is to have fun. Plenty of other games did that this year, but none did it better than this.

All the usual cliches about letting you ‘be’ Batman hold true, this time with everything that makes open-world games so appealing to me. As well as piles of things to do and find, the clear love for the subject matter is brilliantly evident. What also struck me is the bravery with such popular material, Rocksteady not at all seeming intimidated when the times comes to kill off characters – yeah, comic book death and all that – and putting what is clearly a lot of effort into villains who casual fans might not even know of. It even managed to reference just about every Batman incarnation, from the 1960s series to The Animated Series and more modern cinematic adaptations, all the while creating its own distinct version of the mythos.

Pulling off the next in the series will be the real test, though. Batman: Gotham City? Whatever it ends up being runs the risk of diluting what Arkham City did so well by the possible inclusion of things like the Batmobile in its attempts to one-up this masterpiece. But if nothing else, Rocksteady has earned a bit of faith in its abilities. I can’t wait.

Had it gone the distance, though, Portal 2 would have been a worthy game of the year. It expanded a wonderful little idea from The Orange Box into a full-price game without losing any of the charm, and in my book it finally put to bed that old debate about whether games can be funny. It did it intelligently too, not relying on the small pile of overused memes that the original left in its wake – no cake and only a cameo for the Companion Cube – and through a script that’s far too good for a mere game.

My favourite joke? The way it even gets the system-level notifications in on the gag in The Part Where He Kills You. That’s wonderfully self-aware, up there with when Batman: Arkham Asylum made me me think my 360 was red-ringing again and when Eternal Darkness would simulate technical failures for games breaking the fourth wall without simply copying the movie’s methods. Valve did that for drama in Half-Life – no showing you a movie to advance the story there – and now it’s done it with comedy. That company is doing more to advance gaming as a storytelling medium than any other.

Full credit, also, for Valve extending its famous generosity to us console peasants, at least on the PS3. Getting a PC and Mac version thrown in with cross-platform functionality was a brilliantly good idea that showed how forward-thinking Valve is, and also illustrating one major benefit of a more open online suite like PSN. If only there were more Steam for PS3s and fewer Metal Gear Onlines when developers are given such freedom.

Putting aside this fact-that-must-not-be-named, when this generation is over I’m confident that Dark Souls will be remembered as both one of a handful of Japanese games that didn’t disappoint – along with its spiritual predecessor there – and a truly great sequel that was an improvement on the original game in almost all areas. In fact, the only area where I definitively prefer Demon’s Souls to Dark Souls is in the first game’s setting and atmosphere, but the follow-up is no slouch there either.

I admired Dark Souls’ approach to an open world. Although it lacks the sense of unrestricted freedom of a game like Skyrim, putting barriers between the player and the highest peaks and deepest dungeons in favour of a few branching routes, it walks a nice middle ground of being open-ended and at the same time somewhat directed. Different but not worse. A very Western genre through the prism of Japanese design sensibilities. Rather than mediocre attempts at cover shooters, this is the blueprint for Japanese studios struggling to find the best of both worlds.